Yahoo News:
A baby girl who was discovered in an Indiana field following Friday’s devastating tornadoes is in critical condition at a Kentucky hospital, according to the Associated Press.
When the child was found Friday night, she was first taken to a hospital in Salem, Ind. Melissa Richardson, a spokeswoman for St. Vincent Salem Hospital, said authorities are trying to determine how the child wound up in the field alone, since her family lives in New Pekin, Ind., about 10 miles south of where the she was discovered.
Richardson says the girl is at Kosair Children’s Hospital in Louisville, Ky.
Though neither her name nor her family’s name have been released, a hospital spokesperson in Louisville told ABCNews.com that the family has been identified, though they did not say whether they were alive.
The girl was discovered about 30 miles west of Marysville, a 1,900-person town described by Clark County Sheriff’s Department Maj. Chuck Adams as “completely gone.”
Another dramatic rescue took place in Henryville, Ind., the birthplace of Kentucky Fried Chicken founder Col. Harland Sanders, which is about 10 miles away from Marysville
The twister approached right after the town’s elementary, middle and high schools — which are all housed on the same campus — were dismissed early due to severe storm warnings.
Several school buses saw the tornado approaching and returned to school. According to NBC’s Today show, 11 children on one of the buses made it into a school building just before the bus was thrown into another building. Several other empty buses were propelled hundreds of feet.
Glenn Riggs, the principal at Henryville Elementary School, told NBC’s Today show that he and about 40 students and faculty found shelter at the school, lying on the floor of three small offices.
“There was like a decompression,” Riggs said. “It felt almost like your skin was going to be peeled off your face and your ears popped. And of course people were a little upset — some of the children were upset.”
“It was just crash, bang, break …” he said about what it was like when the twister struck. “We knew the school was going up around us, and then the ceilings began to fall apart, and it was like a dust in there for probably about a minute. And then it did stop.”
Another school bus driver decided to pull over and ask a local resident to use their house to shelter the children.
“We got on the buses, we started heading to my house and the tornado was following us,” one student said. “Luckily this woman was so generous to let us stay in her basement.”
Though the schools were almost completely destroyed, no injuries to either students or staff were reported.
The children who remained at the schools during the tornado were taken to the local Henryville community center, where they reunited with their parents.
The deadly storms, which stretched from the Gulf Coast to the Great Lakes, have killed at least 30 people in four states — Kentucky, Indiana, Ohio and Alabama — and destroyed two small towns in Indiana in the second deadly tornado to have occurred this week
